Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds, VR & Internet culture

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

How Many Supporters Does #GamerGate Actually Have? Data Suggests About 10K (UPDATE: Some Related Videos Have Six Figure Views, If Not Supporters)

#GamerGate continues to attract widespread coverage, yeseterday in The New Yorker and today on NPR's "MarketPlace", which would seem to suggest that it's a large movement of gamers outraged at corruption by game journalist and/or feminist game developers and writers, but here's a strange thing I've noticed: All available evidence strongly suggests #GamerGate has very few supporters. (Roughly defining "supporters" as gamers who are actively, deeply, and regularly engaged in that topic.) Less than 10,000 is probably a reasonable estimatea.

Why do I say this? Here's a few data points:

Kotaku in Action, a subreddit for Redditors devoted to GamerGate, as of today only has 5083 subscribers.

The Sarkeesian Effect, a crowdfunded video project which promises to "[peer] inside the world of Social Justice Warriors" (the #GamerGate term for feminists like Anita Sarkeesian), only has 230 backers. (By contrast, Sarkeesian's own Kickstarter has nearly 7,000 backers.)

#GamerGate supporters reading this, if there's other data points I'm missing, please post in Comments and if they're legit, I'll be happy to amend this post. However, first consider this: There's about 3 to 6 million extreme hardcore gamers in the West, roughly defining them as consumers who regularly buy action-oriented AAA console games, and about 50 million total who often play Xbox/Playstation/Steam games. So in stark contrast to all the media coverage #GamerGate is getting, the question becomes:

How come so few gamers actually seem to care about #GamerGate, and how should the media cover such a numerically small movement? Perhaps the only reason it deserves any coverage is in relationship to the continued death/rape threats and harassment its core targets are getting. To attract elevated coverage beyond that, as an actual movement that's legitimately concerned about ethics in game coverage, its supporters will probably need to prove it has hundreds of thousands of supporters -- and is not just a few thousand anonymous male gamers angry at women.

Update, 4:30pm: Reader " FuckItImGandalf" (heh) suggested checking Twitter to measure #GamerGate activity. According to HashTags.org, that hashtag was used about 40,000 times in the last 24 hours. In terms of unique users, that's probably about 10,000-20,000 people, only a fraction of them supporters (since it's also being used by media outlets and critics of the movement).

Update 2, 7:55pm: #GamerGate supporters on Twitter pointed me to a YouTube video (views and Liked/Disliked count screencapped above) widely promoted by them which makes some fairly extreme claims about Zoe Quinn and her game developer colleagues. (Which are potentially libelous, so I'm not directly linking to it.) While this video does have about 850,000 views, many or most these viewers are not necessarily "supporters". (I saw it myself a few days ago, and have seen it linked to by other #GamerGate skeptics, and on gamer sites, which are apt to draw many neutral viewers curious to see what the fuss is about.) So while this video does prove that some #GamerGate-related content is drawing fairly strong notice, it doesn't necessarily establish that #GamerGate itself has a large support base as I definted it above. I await stronger evidence.

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

The original video, along with the videos following it have over 1 million views. The user had a much smaller subscriber based before all of this. You forget that the people for this are GAINING support because of this.

Hey,i'm a supporter of #GamerGate we have women supporting too so dont just make it seem like a single sex is for this

your Data is probably right its better to be a small movement rather than a large movement as that
would cause problems except we cant really get behind being called a "movement" This is a consumer revolt.

There are several biased things in this article :
- Censorship has taken place on Youtube as well as on Reddit (a lot more on the last one, it's almost impossible to talk about GamerGate to a really large audience), so supporters tend to avoid these websites.
- As a consequence and AFAIK, the two main websites used for the supporters are /v/ and Twitter, you can check the activity there if you wish, and I think it's more than you would expect (yesterday for example, #GamerGate was at about the same level as #Destiny in numbers of tweets).
- People communicate mostly through pastebin and archive, so videos are not so watched for this other reason (my opinion is that these videos are fucking lengthy, I prefer text).

So if you could update with figures from Twitter for example, it would be more precise.

Uh.. GamerGate's Luke Skywalker: MundaneMatt's videos has more than 30000+ subscribers (and climbing as we speak.. he's like a nobody few weeks back) and a huge amount of views on his vids. He's a lot more interesting when he's talking about subjects like how "physical copies of games is more eco friendly than digital downloads" than his #GamerGate stuff though (seriously Gamergate vs feminist vs whatever drama is beginning to get pretty tedious guys and girls) You should read the article on The Fine Young Capitalist at APGNation and seeing their indiegogo website, yeah these people more than willing to back women on game designs and more.

It's not unlike game development itself -- you end up spending an inordinate amount of time and setting aside some really innovative features because you're in unceasing war mode against a tiny minority of abusive jerks who are hell-bent on putting you out of business.

And given the details of the Sony attack, it's become a form of terrorism -- complete with a slick-talking political arm to champion the People's struggle against the forces of oppression.